Poetry Response!

Which author are you most similar to?

I think I’m most similar to Emily Dickinson because we overlap, to some extent, in our personalities and interests. I read that the most important things in Dickinson’s life that surfaced in her poetry were religion, individuality, nature and death. I would also consider religion and individuality to be very important to me, which I think is one of the reasons that I love Dickinson’s poems so much. However I find other people very intriguing so if I was to spend my life writing poetry I think I would contemplate humanity more than nature, and focus more on the experiences in life than the experience of death.

 Dickinson was reclusive, very intelligent, and she was very radical in that she went against society’s norms and didn’t go to church, which at that time was very rare. I also tend to be reclusive like Dickinson, though not to the same extreme. However I don’t think I’m anywhere near as intelligent as her, nor as radically set apart from society as she was. Although I try to go against society because I know much of it does not uphold good morals, I often find myself struggling with it not especially succeeding so I don’t think I could be as radical as Dickinson in that respect.  

TPCASTT a poem, what do you see in it?

I decided to TPCASTT “The wind tapped like a tired man” by Emily Dickinson because I love Dickinson’s poetry so much. I think this poem expresses Dickinson’s fascination with nature as it celebrates the beauty of the wind. The poem personifies the wind as a man that visits the speaker’s house. The three middle stanzas paint an image of the different aspects that the wind has as a man. Sometimes the wind is like a “rapid, footless guest” or it sounds like “numerous humming-bird at once” or “music, as of tunes blown tremulous in glass”. Once the wind left “I became alone” which implies that nature keeps us company, and I love this idea of seeing nature as a friend. Overall, I think the poems message is to celebrate and enjoy nature’s company and beauty.

Contemplate hamartia as it relates to one of the poems. 

I chose to contemplate the hamartia in “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” by Margaret Atwood. The poem’s message is definitely enhanced when I think about how it relates to the poem. The central question to the message of the poem is what flaw in society has caused the wars and atrocities that the historian has seen. I have a hard time finding the one reason for it all because the poem suggests too many. “Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win,” this implies that it is man’s pride that leads to his downfall. Men think they are better than their opponent so time after time they march to battle and they are too thick-headed to realize that “rats and cholera have won many wars”. The outcome of the war is not up to them, and the valor that they promote as the victor is not the victor in the end. However, Atwood is a feminist and the speaker in the poem is a female historian who obviously knows what it is that has caused societies downfall but society is afraid of her and doesn’t listen to her. Society prefers that women sacrifice themselves for their children and mourn the dead instead of contemplating war. So Atwood could also be implying that the problem with society is the unfairness in the way that the opinions of men and woman are treated. Women have no say in war and this has led to nothing but disaster.